Short Summary

Chile's military government has been holding in custody sixty-four people, arrested in mass demonstrations in the capital of Santiago on Wednesday (18 April).

Description

Chile's military government has been holding in custody sixty-four people, arrested in mass demonstrations in the capital of Santiago on Wednesday (18 April). The demonstrators staged a march and chained themselves to buildings, demanding information about missing relatives, whom they claim were abducted by military police.

SYNOPSIS: Following the arrests, more protesters staged a hunger strike inside Santiago's cental church - the Basilica of El Salvador. Most of the demonstrators have been women, who claim their husbands, sons, brothers and fiances are being held by the Chilean Secret Police. A United Nations investigation reported last month the more than six hundred people had been detained by Chilean government during 1978, and were still missing.

The military government said it would take legal action against those arrested in the demonstration on the eighteenth of April.

Some of the women protesters had chained themselves to the fences around the government parliamentary buildings, and had to be cut loose by the police. While all this was going on, the women had been chanting "For Life and Peace, tell us where they are".

The widow of Chile's Nobel Prize winning poet, Pablo Neruda, claimed to have been among those arrested last week but said she was later released after the Venezuelan Ambassador to Chile, had intervened. Senora Matilde Urrutia de Neruda told a Santiago newspaper that, before being released, she was made to sign a statement saying she was well treated. But according to Reuters reports, the police denied all knowledge of her arrest or detainment.